Philosophy Made Simple (17 page)

“I’ve got Mama’s fountain pen in my pocket,” he said. He took the pen out of his pocket and showed it to her. It was too dark to read the inscription, but she held it in her hand as they walked.

“Do you wish you’d never found out?” she asked. “About Bruni?”

“No,” he said. “I can’t imagine not knowing.” When they reached the river Rudy turned off the flashlight and they stood in silence, listening to the night sounds: peepers, cicadas, king rails, the
wheet wheet wheeeer
of the pauraques, the whistle of a screech owl on the other side of the river.

“I suppose,” he said after a few minutes, “if Mama hadn’t had the affair with Bruni, she’d have become someone else. But I didn’t want her to be anyone else. I just wanted her to be who she was.”

“Did you become a different person too, Pop?”

“I guess I did,” he said. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“You were a saint.”

He shook his head.

“But who knows about Dan,” she said — a statement, not a question.

“Maybe you’ll find out,” he said, “and maybe you won’t.”

He told her about floating down the river on the anniversary of Helen’s death, the day she’d called from Chicago and told him she’d been seeing a shrink. He told her about letting go and just floating.

“And then you had a heart attack,” she said. “Oh, Pop. You’re as crazy as Mama. And tomorrow you’re getting an elephant.
Remember the chicken that Mama adopted?”

Rudy laughed. “Chicky-chick was some chicken, except she turned out to be a rooster. And Norma Jean is some elephant.”

He turned the flashlight on again and they walked back to the house in silence. What he knew now he’d known from the beginning:
that if Helen hadn’t gotten sick, hadn’t been diagnosed with leukemia right after Easter, she wouldn’t have come home. What she’d had wasn’t a little
aventura.
It was the real thing — ecstasy. He’d seen it in her face when he went to Italy. She was going to send Margot home in June,
but she was going to stay for the summer. To do research, she said, but he knew that she wanted to stay so she could be with Bruni. He should have had it out with her then, in Italy, should have forced her to choose between him and Bruni, should have challenged Bruni to a duel, should have hunted the man down, the son of a bitch. Instead he’d backed away, let it ride. He
had
become a different person. He’d become the person he was now.

Meg and Rudy drank coffee on the veranda in the morning while they waited for the Russian to arrive with Norma Jean. Molly,
off in India, had left the wedding arrangements up to her father. Meg didn’t think it was right, but Rudy could see that she was glad to help out, glad to have a project.

“All Molly wants,” she said, “is plenty of good champagne and lots of the frozen
Saint-Cyrs
you always made for special occasions.”

“Don’t forget the sacred fire,” Rudy said. “And the
mandap.
That’s the wedding tent.”

Meg had the brochure from the Detroit hotel, so they had something to start with. “You’re sure about this, Pop? It’d be a lot easier to do it at the hotel in Detroit. You just had a heart attack … and what do you know about Indian weddings?”

“1 know that you need a
mandap”
he said, “and a sacred fire. I’ve talked to the manager of the Taj Mahal about the dinner, and I’ve got the phone number of a pandit. I’ve got his card, in fact. What more do you want? An elephant? We’ve got an elephant too. How hard can it be?
I put on a terrific wedding for you, didn’t I? A hog roast? Two big turkeys?”

“That was different. That was a
Midwestern
wedding.”

Rudy shrugged his shoulders. “Here’s the Russian,” he said; “I can hear his truck.”

The Russian pulled into the yard towing an open horse trailer behind his pickup. Norma Jean was looking over the side of the trailer.

Meg shook her head and stood up. “This pandit,” she said, “is this the guy you were telling me about? The one who got rid of the crows?”

“Right.”

“Well, he must have something going for him.”

Meg and Rudy walked down the drive and watched as the Russian pulled the ramp for Norma Jean out from under the bed of the open horse trailer. When Rudy approached, to help the Russian lock the ramp into place, the elephant reached over the side of the trailer with her trunk and grabbed his wrist. He tried to pull his arm back, but she held his wrist tightly and lifted it slowly to her mouth, as if she were going to bite his hand off.

“Is okay,” the Russian said. “She want you should pet her
tongue. Is very big honor. Is how elephants greet each other, only you don’t have no trunk. You got to use your hand. She remember how she save your life.”

Rudy closed his eyes and let his hand rest on the huge tongue.

“She like if you move your hand around back and forth,” the Russian said.

Rudy stroked the elephants tongue. It was rough and smooth and slippery all at the same time, and it was attached at the front as well as at the back, so that instead of flapping up and down, like a human tongue, it undulated with a gentle, rhythmical movement, like a wave humping up over a shoal. When she’d had enough, Norma Jean took his wrist in her trunk and removed his hand from her mouth. She rumbled her appreciation and raised her foot and stomped the floor of the trailer. Rudy wiped his hand on his pants. The Russian checked the ramp and opened the gate.

“Peachay,”
he shouted, and Norma Jean began to back down the ramp. “
Peachay,”
the Russian repeated. “It take her a while to get used to new place,” he said to Rudy. “We take slow and easy.” Norma Jean backed off the ramp, trumpeted, and looked around. The Russian took her on a little tour, showing her the house, Rudy’s garden,
the garage, the big sugar hackberries at the south end of the house, and finally the barn.

The Russian was going to sleep in the old tack room, which still smelled of soap and leather, though it hadn’t been used in years. The three horse stalls had been extra large to begin with, so Norma Jean had plenty of room in the barn, and in the day she could stay outside in the old paddock. Rudy didn’t like the look of the three-tiered, five-thousand-volt electric fence that he and the Russian had shifted from the Russian’s paddock, but he didn’t want Norma Jean running loose, and there didn’t seem to be any alternative.

The sight of Norma Jeans bulbous head, her big eyes, her trunk, which she waved at him, made Rudy smile, but when he stood beside her and put his hand on her shoulder and felt her strength, he experienced something close to awe. He had expected her skin to feel leathery, like a basketball, but it was soft and hairy, like the thick Pendleton blanket he’d given to Molly one year for her birthday

“Now we inspect her new home,” the Russian said. “
Agit, agit.”
But Norma Jean balked when the Russian tried to lead her into the barn.

“She know something up,” he said. He got an ankus out of the cab of the truck and tugged on the loose folds of skin along her leg. She trumpeted loudly. He tugged again, pulling harder this time with the curved hook of the ankus — “
agit, agit”
— and she lumbered slowly into the dark barn and into her stall, which had been covered with straw bedding.

“Is good,” the Russian said, cutting the twine on a bale of alfalfa and spreading it out.

Meg stood next to Rudy and watched while Norma Jean explored her stall, testing the latch with her trunk.

“We put in a special latch,” Rudy said to Meg. “Elephant-proof.”

Norma Jean tugged on one of the eyebolts in the back of the stall and then reached over the wall of the stall and turned on the hose. The Russian said something to her and she turned it off and then tried to unscrew a nut, but Rudy and the Russian had tightened everything with a wrench.

“You want to pet her?” the Russian asked Meg. “You come over here. She like if you tickle her.”

Norma Jean looked at them with amber-colored eyes. Her lashes were long and wiry. Meg approached cautiously and touched her trunk.

“Go on ahead,” the Russian said. “Tickle her nose. Ha ha ha. Is all hairy.”

Norma Jean pulled her trunk back and reached up under Meg’s left armpit. Meg jumped back.

“She like tickle you too,” the Russian said, shaking with laughter. Norma Jean seemed to be laughing as well, a deep elephant chuckle.

“I got her things in the truck,” the Russian said. He opened a sack of oranges and tossed one into the stall. Norma Jean mashed it with her foot, mixing it in with a little alfalfa before scooping it up and flipping it into her mouth. Rudy and Meg watched her while the Russian went out to the truck and came back with a soccer ball and an oversized plastic harmonica.
“Maybe we take a quick look outside,” he said, “so she can see everything before she have her lunch.” A door at the far end of the barn opened into the paddock.

Out in the paddock Norma Jean swiveled her head around, raised her trunk in the air, shot it out straight, and exhaled sharply at the Russian, who responded by blowing into the end of it.

“She be happy here, you’ll see. You be happy too. There are elephant with good disposition and elephant with bad disposition.
Norma Jean have good disposition.”

The Russian went back to the truck to unload her easel and her paints and brushes. Norma Jean galloped over to a couple of scrubby acacia trees at far end of the paddock and pulled off a branch, which she used to scratch her back. Then she walked the perimeter of the paddock and came back to the barn.

“Its a little scary to see her out there,” Rudy said, “to see how fast she can move.”

“So, she saved your life, Pop?”

“Lifted me right up into the bed of the truck. The Russian couldn’t have done it by himself.”

Norma Jean ambled toward them and stopped. She lifted her trunk and touched Meg’s hair. Meg held very still. “It’s all right,”
Rudy said. “It’s all right.”

That night Rudy woke up about three o’clock, as he often did, and couldn’t get back to sleep. He went into Meg’s room and sat on the edge of her bed for a while and stroked her hair. He went back to bed and turned on the radio, which was tuned to the local station. Bob and Helen had put their failed predictions of the Second Coming behind them, though they hadn’t lost interest in the subject. Tonight they were taking calls about the pandit who had gotten rid of the crows. Where had the crows gone? callers wanted to know. What did it mean? Who was this pandit anyway? Rudy was interested. He had the man’s card in his pocket, after all.

One caller suggested that the pandit might be the Ancient of Days, but Bob and Helen didn’t think that was likely, because the Ancient of Days wore a snow white robe, whereas the pandit’s robe was saffron colored. Another wondered if the coming of the crows and their subsequent disappearance might be a sign of the Last Days and reminded listeners that only Jesus saves
— not Bob and Helen, not the Ancient of Days, not the pandit. Only Jesus. Only Jesus. A car dealer called in to say that he didn’t care who the pandit was, he’d gotten rid of the crows and now he didn’t have to wash the crow droppings off his fleet of four hundred cars every day

Rudy turned the radio off and got up to go to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror while he washed his hands.
The knot of anxiety in his stomach showed in his face. He knew better than to turn on the radio in the middle of the night.
He’d think he was immune to Bob and Helen, but they always managed to upset him.

He didn’t know much about the Ancient of Days, but he could hear an old hymn ringing in his head:

O Worship the King, all glorious above,

O gratefully sing, his pow’r and his love,

Our shield and defender, the Ancient of Days,

Pavilioned in splendor, and girded with praise!

He heard a trumpet blast from the barn. Norma Jean was awake too. He went downstairs and stepped out onto the veranda for a minute. He caught a whiff of elephant dung — fruity, not unpleasant — and sensed a throbbing
phut phut phut,
like the pulse of a freight train in the distance — the infrasonic sounds that elephants use to call to each other over long distances. He couldn’t actually hear these sounds, but he could sense them, and he thought that Norma Jean was trying to communicate something to him, trying to tell him that soon he would see clearly and that everything would be all right.